Apple is keeping it pricey with a $49 cable for its new Thunderbolt interface. (Source: Ubergizmo)

(Source: iFixIt)

Apple's Thunderbolt cable contains over 10 chips (Source: iFixIt)

But this cable has chips, so it must be worth it!

Apple,
Inc. (AAPL) is borrowing a play from
Monster Cables offering a cable that's almost as pricey as the peripherals it
plans to support. The new Thunderbolt cable will retail for $49 USD.

Plugging in to the Mini Display Port of new
MacBook Pros and iMacs,
the cable offers support for "Thunderbolt", a new high speed
communications standard from Intel Corp. (INTC). With the first
peripheral (a RAID drive bay from Pegasus)
launching, attention has turned to this pricey little number.

IFixIttore the white cable
apart and found a pair of Gennum
GN2033 chips hiding beneath the sheathing, with one on each connector
of the cable. In total there were also 10 other smaller tiny chips and an
assortment of transistors, etc.

And there's the question of USB 3.0, which has already seen much more broad
adoption. USB 3.0 offers transfer speeds of up to 4 Gbit/s. While
only about half the speed of the current Thunderbolt implementation, that's
still pretty blazing fast so the question remains how many customers will
actually notice a difference.

To Monster Cables' credit, at least it only charges $29 for
its "gold-plated" USB 2.0 cables, which it brags "rejects
noise" and works to "maximize signal integrity." Sound
familiar?

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quote: I guess you guys are too young to remember when the cheapest usable SCSI cables were $50.

A SCSI cable is a lot harder to make, though. It had 50-80 individual wires inside that all were insulated, and the connector was much larger and had a lot more contacts. This Thunderbolt cable has less than half that.

Absolute nonsense, SCSI cables of whatever flavour were really no more sophisticated than any other ribbon cable and the science was in the design - manufacturing costs were not massive as the design had taken care of how the thing went together and that is very easily.

Since you are counting contacts, lets examine how exactly you pack all of that stuff into a connector sheath that is 8mm or so square. I think there is a hell of a lot of tech in there for $50 and it's not like you need one for anything as mundane as a camera or printer so the USB comparisons are irrelevant.

Plus let's not forget Intel's hand in this, but don't let that get in the way of a bit of desperate Apple bashing.

Indeed but you may recall that the terminator block was just a big pack of resistors anyway, it was something you could build yourself if you were so inclined at a fraction of the price.

Irrespective SCSI was an incredibly expensive system, I remember building a card into a PC back in 1993 just so I could have a decent performance CD-ROM drive (Toshiba Caddy Load, wooo!) and the sum for that little lot was over £500 (probably near $900 back then).

Then there was the Seagate 2Gb SCSI hard drive on the same bus. A bargain at £1200...